But I like to be the contrarian.

I say stop reading.

Take an interaction.

It can be any interaction but preferably human-machine interface.

Take it apart.

Figure out what is the desired path.

Figure out where things can or do go wrong.

Put it back together again.

Take notes.

Figure out how to improve the interaction.

Test it with other humans besides yourself.

Repeat with many many others.

So, recently, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing with the information architecture/user experience practices of a number of different firms, and came away with differing and occasionally overlapping views about what each believed IAs should do, and I think this speaks directly to the lumping and splitting problem that is at the center of controversy among, ironically, IAs, UXers, IxDs, and whoever might consider themselves to be part of this group.

As anyone who has worked with taxonomy knows, there is a famous problem called lumping and splitting when it comes to placing things into categories: those who lump tend to elide differences, and seek out commonalities, which results in less complex, but more unwieldy definitions; those who split tend to emphasize difference, but this results in greater complexity, even as one moves toward precision. Well, this is precisely what is happening within the work that we do. I think Jared Spool recently wrote on an IxDA thread about UCD v. ACD, true, it may not matter too much to the patient what procedure might be done so long as they are cured of their disease, but it is important to us, the practitioners, what is included in what we call whatever it is we do and what is not. For example, we would not want someone who is not an oncologist to be working on cancer. But yet, in IA work, we do something like that, because we have not determined where the splits occur and what those splits are.

For instance, is it likely that those of us who work on synonym rings and authority files and metadata schema like Dublin Core will ever be working on interaction design for a complex, customer-facing  transactional application? I can tell you that after 12 years in corporate America that I have never been asked to work on enterprise information architecture on a corporate intranet, which is a hardcore library and info science practice. I certainly would want someone who is a credentialed MLIS or having equivalent experience working on similar projects on that. Taxonomy for a footwear vertical within an online department store? Maybe less so. Layout of a travel application page, or determining the process flow of a balance transfer system for users within a banking application? Maybe not so much. Maybe we want to have someone who has experience as an interaction designer working on some of these things. Maybe we want to have more than one person touching this to make sure all the pieces are there.

The usability body of knowledge within the UPA is a good start. It’s true that the techniques we use to get to the end result are largely the same, but the kinds of specialities that people are working on are not. Maybe we should be pushing people to identify themselves as what kind of IA/UX/IxD that someone is, and maybe we should be pushing HR and staffing managers to also ID the kinds of skills they’re looking for as well so that there’s a good fit for the client and for the practitioner as well. Who knows, maybe in another five, ten years we’ll start lumping again.

For those not in the know, progressive disclosure (PD) is a technique we use in interface design, partly to mitigate information overload, to signal that a secondary action is possible, and if selected, information will be solicited from the user. So within that sentence we can already take away a few things:

- the primary use of PD is not a space-saving measure to cram more stuff into less space but to reduce information overload;

- PD is first and foremost a signal that an action is possible, for which more info will be collected, but that the action is either secondary or optional, and not primary.

- very important or required information should not be tucked away as secondary information using progressive disclosure;

- It should be clear to the user that an optional action is possible and allow them to discover the action and information without commitment or throwing an error.

For those not in the know, carousels are a kind of web user interface widget that essentially displays a subset of a larger set of information in a loop, and typically not only shows where the user is in the set of information being shown, but also the allow the user to control the direction of scrolling. The most common use for this is a space-saving measure when one wants to display a short (say, between 5 and 10 objects) series of serially-related objects. Why 10? Well, because typically, one has to retain in short-term memory what is NOT being shown in the loop of larger information, and where that might be located, and so memorability of the thing or things desired becomes an issue the larger the set becomes. That’s when we might invoke the cognitive psychologist’s Rule of Seven (plus or minus 2). But beyond that there are other issues:

• Are the controls to advance and reverse the carousel immediately discoverable and perceiveable?
• Are the objects in the carousel of a like kind?
• When you mouseover the object in the carousel, does it give feedback that it is selectable or selected?
• Can the user tell immediately where the list of objects begins and ends and where they currently are in the larger set of objects?

For more info you can look at the Yahoo Design Pattern Library entry on Carousels.

Should we not recruit passionate users, who tend disproportionately also to be expert users, and therefore, are unrepresentative of typical users of a site?

Should we start to disaggregate the different kinds of work we now commonly lump into information architecture and user experience for the digital channel so we can more appropriately identify, hire, staff and train for those jobs?

Besides the TV ads, Microsoft is adding content to windows.com, creating a related site called lifewithoutwalls.com, and placing magazine and billboard ads depicting how Windows is used for mobile devices, TV sets and laptops, according to the Times. It’s also training 155 “Windows Gurus” to work in electronics retailers such as Best Buy and Circuit City to help market Microsoft’s software.

Of course, millions are in Apple Stores seeking help at the Genius Bar. And millions were spent by Apple creating all those ads. So.

Perhaps this is in fact part of the market entry cost. . . .

For instance, the task in a u-test might be that we are looking for a camera but because we are accident prone would like to get the store’s extended care for that product. Of course, within the context of that test the user can only search the site to find the thing they’re looking for: we could bury it down a page under the fold and the user may or may not find it.

But findability in and of itself doesn’t necessarily mean that the user will take that action. It is an entirely different question as to whether or not the user who comes to your site will, in fact, add the in-store purchase protection plan or habitually rejects it, and if the intent of the business is to boost the numbers of customers who have purchased this highly profitable sideline, then, it then falls upon user experience to actually help craft such an experience, provided of course that that is the metric upon which success is determined.

Where the item is positioned on the page, if and how a feature interrupts the user’s shopping experience, the visual messaging, how that feature interacts with other features, all contribute to the user experience for a given element. And if you do decide to bury the PPP under the fold, given my experiences with false bottoms on web pages, we might even posit that if the user doesn’t see it, they won’t act on it unless they’re actively looking for something. . . .

Weird. Bits of Mozilla and such. So does this mean we’re playing around with what is essentially with a souped up version of Safari? Like Spinal Tap: “These go to 11.”

But if you were to create your own browser experience, what would it be like?

Instead, it’s believed that changes will need to be made on the part of 3G providers to optimize their networks “in terms of number of towers, how they’re positioned and how much bandwidth each tower can handle.”

Still waiting for Godot. . .

Expert designers appear to be ‘ill-behaved’ problem solvers, especially in terms of the time and attention they spend on defining the problem. However, this seems to be appropriate behaviour, since some studies have suggested that over-concentration on problem definition does not lead to successful design outcomes. It appears that successful design behaviour is based not on extensive problem analysis, but on adequate ‘problem scoping’ and on a focused or directed approach to gathering problem information and prioritising criteria.